Category Archives: Photographs: Utah

Mud Patterns

Mud Patterns
“Mud Patterns” — Colorful patterns formed in dry and cracked mud, Capitol Reef.

Recently I went through my archives to see just how many photographs of dried mud I have made over the years. It is a lot! There are perhaps a few dozen finished photographs of this subject that I have shared publicly. But there are scores of them sitting in my unprocessed raw file archives. This one, in fact, is one that I “discovered” during this search, and I’m now sharing it for the first time.

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Cliff Face in Morning Light

Cliff Face in Morning Light
“Cliff Face in Morning Light” — Warm early-morning sunlight intensifies colors and textures of a sandstone cliff, Arches National Park.

We had finished dawn photography of nearby formations on this October morning at Arches National Park. As I was working that subject I kept noticing this remarkable bit of cliff, also in the direct morning sunlight. The larger formation of which it is a part did not offer me any obvious photographic subject, so I switched to a long lens and zeroed in on the colors and textures of this small portion of the scene.

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Juniper Tree, Water-Stained Cliff

Juniper Tree, Water-Stained Cliff
“Juniper Tree, Water-Stained Cliff” — A Juniper Tree, Water-Stained Cliff solitary juniper tree grows at the base of a water-stained sandstone cliff.

Several things about the scene caught my attention as we passed through this area in of Capitol Reef National Park. The background is one of the thickest and most monumental strata in this area of the park. The surface of this solid rock is, however, marked in all sorts of ways. Notably there are stains from flowing water, and in a couple of vertical bands the flow has been regard enough to encourage the growth of lichens.

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Sandstone Towers

Sandstone Towers
“Sandstone Towers” — Red rock sandstone towers, Arches National Park.

Remembering the October day when I made this photograph, I recall that there were some thunderstorms around the area and that we had mixed light. These were those wonderful conditions where it might rain one moment and the next there might be brilliant sunshine, always with the possibility of a dramatic sky. It appears that I made this exposure during one of those sunny breaks. (Looking at other original exposures in the sequence, not all of them had this light.)

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